proofreading

We have been fortunate to have a series of visiting Digital Humanities scholars at the University of Rochester over the last few months, and while all of their projects and approaches have been very different, most have still emphasized the importance of collaboration in their work. We’ve written a post about the topic before, but this time I want to focus more generally on the different kinds of group work we engage in at BAND.

One of the main principles at the Blake Archive, is “transcribe what you see.” This has been useful in making many editorial choices about how to represent an image of a work on a digital page. As Laura discussed in her Sept. 24th post, there is sometimes a tension between what we read and what we see. I am currently proofing our transcription of a manuscript known by its first lines, “then She bore Pale desire.” Just like Laura, there are times when I am unsure if I am seeing the manuscript or reading the manuscript. One example of this deals with the spacing between handwritten characters:

At the Blake Archive, we strive for god-like workmanship. As such, proofreading for sinful mistakes is an important step in our process. Currently, we have several publications “on-deck” for publishing, but this means that several eyes have to pass over those documents. I am currently proofing a typographical work called Poetical Sketches.

By Margaret Speer In my January 15th 2014 blog post, I mentioned that a goal of mine since relatively early in my time as a Project Assistant to the William Blake Archive (sounds so fancy, doesn’t it?) has been to improve upon the Letters Proofing Form. Side by side with this idea was to maybe even create a generalized proofing form that could be useful for all projects, something to be the Queen Mother Proofing Form. This comment caught the attention of the lovely Laura, and thus the monster was born.

Here at BAND, we’re deep into proofreading a batch of Blake’s letters that are currently being prepared for publication. The large amount of different objects (over thirty letters) means that everyone on the team has been involved in the process and so we have been recording any questions and discrepancies that we note on a shared Google doc. As I discussed in a post a few weeks ago, the term “proofreading” at BAND means a lot more that the word usually suggests, and this current project provides some good working examples of this part of the process.

The unsung hero of the editing process is proofreading. Here at the Blake Archive, what we call “proofreading” has to take into account the disparate, interactive nature of the multimedia editions we publish. As a result, our interpretation of the term consists of a range of activities that are more varied than those conventionally involved in proofreading.